Playing Across Cultures

When clarinetist David Krakauer first heard Osvaldo Golijov’s “Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind,” for clarinet and string quartet, he was amazed by the young composer’s epic distillation of Jewish musical culture, from his own specialty, klezmer, to sacred Hebrew chant.

The reaction from cellist Paul Katz, who premiered the piece with the now-disbanded Cleveland Quartet, was a world apart. After reading through the klezmer movement, he pulled the composer aside and said, “This is the sexiest tango I’ve ever heard.”

“Tango was the furthest thing from my mind,” the Argentine-born Golijov admits. “But if it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. What can you do?”

Part of a generation of composers who draw freely from their own backgrounds, the 39-year-old Golijov inhabits a world that contains a multitude of influences. Echoes of his childhood in La Plata and early adulthood in Jerusalem reverberate with equal parts humor and spirituality, and those looking for an easy label for the composer are likely to be thwarted.

In fewer than five years, “Dreams and Prayers” has seen the kind of success most composers only dream of. Shortly after the Cleveland Quartet premiere, with Giora Feidman, another well-established klezmer clarinetist, the piece was picked up by both the Kronos Quartet, which recorded it with Krakauer for Nonesuch records, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet. The latter will perform it next Sunday with clarinetist Todd Palmer at the La Jolla Chamber Music Festival, where Golijov is one of this year’s composers in residence.

Few pieces have inspired so much loyalty from performers. “About every hundred years or so, somebody writes a clarinet quartet that defines their era,” says the Kronos’ first violinist and music director David Harrington. “First there was Mozart, then there was Brahms. Now I think we have Osvaldo.”

“This is one of the greatest pieces in the clarinet repertoire this century,” Palmer adds. “It’s Osvaldo’s early bid for immortality.”

The composer’s own claims are considerably more modest. “ ‘Dreams and Prayers’ was the first time I began to write the music I live,” Golijov says, “music that from moment to moment is as direct as folk music, but has an architecture that leaves you at a different place at the end. Before, I was self-conscious that showing a sense of humor might make the music seem cheap. Now I am cheap without fear.”

Golijov’s ability to find profundity in the folksiest of material was evident in “Dreams and Prayers” from the beginning. Less obvious was his success at turning the klezmer style into a chamber work for all players, since Feidman’s performance was a certified star turn.

Such hair-splitting became an issue during the 1995 Kennedy Center Friedheim Awards for chamber music, where “Dreams and Prayers” eventually took first prize. “At first there was concern that it was just a solo piece for Giora,” says Sarah Rothenberg, pianist and artistic director for Da Camera of Houston, who served on that year’s Friedheim jury. “But [at the competition] the piece was performed by players from the National Symphony, not a standing ensemble, none of whom, I think, were even Jewish--and the piece still stood on its own.”

That was encouraging news for Palmer, whose own exposure to klezmer, he admits, was limited by growing up a Methodist in Haggerstown, Md.

“What’s great about Osvaldo’s piece is that it gives you artistic license to rely on your own good taste,” the clarinetist says. “I’d never call myself a klezmer player, but the piece gives me the courage to play stylistically in my own Gentile way.”

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In reality, Golijov’s exposure to klezmer was almost as distant as Palmer’s.

Growing up in the small but unified Jewish community of La Plata, Golijov maintained a strong cultural identification with Judaism, if not a religious one.

“I wasn’t particularly devout,” he says, “but the synagogue was near the basketball court.”

Nonetheless, Golijov sang in the synagogue choir. And he was tied through his family to the town’s musical life. It was his mother, a pianist, who inspired his early musical ambitions.

“I played piano badly, the violin even worse,” he says. “If I could play as well as I wanted to, I would never have had reason to compose.”

With a teacher’s encouragement, Golijov’s childhood doodling became conscious composing at age 12, when he wrote a tone poem inspired by a Borges story, which he performed with friends at school. He later met composer Astor Piazzolla, whose revolutionary nuevo tango divided the Golijov household just as he divided the rest of the country.

“My mother admired him,” he says, “but my father, who was a great tango lover, did not.

Nonetheless, Piazzolla joined Golijov’s personal pantheon of musical greats, alongside Bach and Beethoven.

Golijov’s 1983 move to Jerusalem, at age 22, was triggered less by dreams of sharing a Jewish homeland than by outrage at his native country’s history of despotism and its nationalism during the Falklands War. Golijov, and his Argentine wife Silvia, felt at home in Israel, no longer in the minority for the first time. But after three years they decided to come to the United States.

“I’m really happy that I’m raising my family here,” says Golijov, whose three children range in age from 4 to 10. “I compare my children’s schooling with my own, and I am still amazed that there is no military presence.

“In Israel,” he continues, “everything is a case of life or death--even getting a loaf of bread is a major thing. I’m happy to have lived there, but I needed to move to a place where you can make things happen. In America I am able to work with people who exist in Argentina and Israel only on record covers.”

At first Golijov studied at the University of Pennsylvania with George Crumb, himself a composer known for fusing personal musical statements with a wide range of influences, and then in 1991 he moved his family to suburban Boston.

It was at Tanglewood in 1992 that he first encountered the St. Lawrence Quartet. He was a composer fellow, the quartet was in residence at the festival. By the quartet’s account, their relationship was anything but love at first sight. The ensemble approached his first string quartet, “Yiddishbbuk,” as a professional obligation at best--the score didn’t look promising on the page. And the young composer kept making changes.

“Even during rehearsals, new music was still coming to us, and we couldn’t make hide nor hair of it,” recalls St. Lawrence violinist Barry Shiffman. “Only when he began to vocalize the music did we realize we were in the presence of a real composer.

“Usually we encounter composers who don’t really know what they want to hear,” adds the quartet’s cellist, Marina Hoover. “Osvaldo definitely knew what he wanted.”

The St. Lawrence’s performance of “Yiddishbbuk” grabbed the attention of the Kronos’ Harrington and led to the commission of “Dreams and Prayers” for the Cleveland.

“With the Kronos, I feel they are my teachers in the way they transcend borders,” Golijov says of his relationship with various quartets. “But the St. Lawrence and I are family. We discovered each other in a seminal point in our musical [lives]. Now we never have to explain anything.”

“We’ve grown as a quartet at about the same rate Osvaldo has grown as a composer,” says Hoover.

“It’s mostly a matter of trust,” St. Lawrence violist Lesley Robertson says. “After we did the first piece we already believed in the next ones.”

Since “Dreams and Prayers,” Golijov’s work has begun to tap more strongly into his Latin roots. The same year as “Dreams and Prayers,” Golijov also completed “Last Rounds (Tango for Piazzolla),” which the St. Lawrence performs this October with Da Camera of Houston. The 1996 premiere of his Brazilian-influenced choral work “Oceana” (“the most non-Jewish piece I’ve written,” he says) at the Oregon Bach Festival led to his current project--a two-hour St. Mark Passion in Spanish, commissioned by the Bach Academy in Stuttgart for the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death in the fall of 2000.

Is it strange for the composer of a Jewish epic to immerse himself in Christian liturgy?

“Yes and no,” he says. “Coming from Argentina, it is not so strange.”

The text of the Book of Mark, which he finds the least anti-Semitic of the gospels, has been his entree into a new spiritual realm. “I particularly envy Catholic composers, the way they can be at peace with their belief,” he says. “I wanted ‘Dreams and Prayers’ to achieve a certain resignation, and I just wasn’t able to do it. What was supposed to be beautiful and static came out stormy. But you have to be who you are, and part of being Jewish is arguing with God.”

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“DREAMS AND PRAYERS OF ISAAC THE BLIND,” Summerfest ‘99, Sherwood Auditorium, 700 Prospect St., La Jolla. Dates: Next Sunday, 3 p.m. Price: $30-35. Phone: (619) 459-3724.